One thought on “William Collins: “Boys Beat Girls at A level? Err, No (Again).””

1. As usual, sterling work from Mr. Collins. Of course despite the educational “gap” now charted for 30 years nothing will be done. And the reason is “hidden” in this accurate analysis The white working class is a time bomb ready to explode Their suggestion, to return to education for all, including “practical skills”, cannot be countenanced today. The reason is in my own education in 1970s in a prosperous working class suburb. It was, after “failing” the “11 plus”, a large very well equipped “Secondary Modern” with laboratories, workshops, kilns, sports and PT as well excellent “domestic science” and the “academic” subjects. It was also single sex (unusually it still is). Despite the continuing redundant huffing and puffing about “Grammar Schools” the real block is the last point. For the beneficiaries of an education system that can interest, challenge, and channel excess energy and produce positive outcomes for a wide variety of occupations. Will be boys. And boys, specially working class boys, are “toxic” and have to be held back or else they’ll achieve their aim to have a decent job become fathers and family men … oppressing women. Am I inventing conspiracies? No because the responses to Mary Curnock-Cook, head of UCAS from the feminist “blob” , as she repeatedly (each year) raised the gender gap in education, were exactly that; nothing must be done to address this gap because generally 25 years after leaving education on average men earn a bit more than women and some become CEOs. As feminists repeatedly remind us, women crowd into a narrow range of occupations “Admin” particularly the public sector, “teaching”, “Care” and Health (again largely publicly funded) . While men continue to head for a huge range of occupations, and would be even better equipped to do so if “practical education” was on offer, just as my contemporaries went into professional catering, “wet” and “dry” trades, all sorts of engineering, horticulture, retail, driving of all sorts, even the nascent coding for the the early computer and robot industries, manufacturers, metallurgy…… as well as even those that women crowd into.

   So we can’t have good “practical education”, not because it might take us back to the supposed bad old days of “selective” education, but because it would start to challenge the education gender gap by equipping more boys with useful qualifications for occupations we constant say we are short of (and fill with men from central and eastern european countries who do prize “technical” education) and they may then achieve their potential and find a mate and form families…. the oppressive bastards!

   I happen to have just rediscovered my copy of Sex Change Society by Melanie Phillips (doing some sorting out of cupboards). Published in 1999 it is remarkably accurate in predictions about what she demonstrated was already the agenda 26 years ago. The interesting thing is that at that time the Labour politicians (they were in power) she quotes were almost all men. The agenda of feminism was advanced by men in power enacting an “ism” an ideology.

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